Mages, ten-man raiding, and other things that are awesome.

Because you can never have too many draenei. This was a gift commissioned from Snack for his fiancee Melisan and they are getting married very soon! So I think it’s like a wedding gift, sort of – on my part, that is. A little. Anyhow, here you have it:

"This is my BAN hammer." No, not really.

I’ve been trying to work on incorporating backgrounds into my work more often (witness this, and the last Tuesday art day, also a draenei paladin.) I think it’s an endeavour that’s been going well so far!

I’m working on a WoW-themed Christmas card that will be sure to make an appearance here, as well as a Secret Santa art exchange between other Twitter folks. It’s very exciting. I love and hate secrets all at the same time.

Meantime, I hear something happened to Azeroth last night… like five years of time lapse and Deathwing. Doubtless I’ll have some things to say about that this week. I’ve spent my initial time in Azeroth pretty much acquiring Withers and then playing Plants vs Zombies: WoW Edition before I had to call it a night. I’ll confess, I’m really not that good at Plants vs Zombies.

To chime in on the picture, for a little extra – or, to be ignored at people’s leisure – there’s a lot of little details Vid added that were either 1) at request or 2) coincidentally relevant.

About this time last year I was trying to convince my fiancee that she’d really enjoy playing World of Warcraft and her exasperated response was “Only if I can hit things with a hammer!”

A few weeks later, when we actually had time to play? Paladin. (she later found out she can be a shaman and have TWO HAMMERS. AT ONCE. This is a big deal.)

Finally, the background setting has Quaras in Hellfire Peninsula – before we arrived there, I’d told Mel about the Fel Reaver, how this giant monster would sneak up on players and kill them in a single hit. As she saw it, from the safety of my computer screen, as I flew high above it on a mount, recounting the tale of when one patch accidentally bugged the Fel Reaver into a bear, she scoffed. “Nobody’d let that sneak up on them.”

When we finally reached Hellfire Peninsula, we were running around questing – killing boars and snakes and all the stupid Outlands stuff that we have to do, and we heard the sound at the same time, that hideous metal on metal scraping airhorn, and we both wheel our cameras around, “FEL REAVER!” “Quick, run this way!” we say to each other in a panic, as we… then proceed to run the exact opposite direction from each other, as the Fel Reaver passed on his merry little way…